had to relieve herself. I… fell back asleep before she came back. In fact… I fell back asleep within seconds. It was impossible to keep my eyes open.”
“You think someone drugged us to get to her?” I asked, my own brows locking into a matching frown.
“More likely used magic,” Saga said.
“Son of a bitch!” Bjarni snarled, grief turning to fury in the blink of an eye. “She promised Loki she’d free him. If she did and he repaid her by snatching her, so help me—”
“But if he was the Betrayer, why not allow Níðhöggr to eat us alive?” Modi asked. “It would have been much easier than…. this.”
“Loki does whatever will gain him the most,” I said, not quite managing to keep the disdain for my new brothers’ father from my voice. “He could have taken her for reasons we have no understanding of.”
“Where is Grim?” Bjarni asked.
It wasn’t until then I realized we were short one Lokisson.
“He left while we were with her last night,” Saga said. “He has no way of knowing she’s gone, so likely he’s somewhere in Valhalla, sulking.”
“Perhaps he has seen something,” Bjarni said, the hope in his voice infectious enough to make my heart pick up speed.
“Then let us find him,” Modi said. He pushed off the floor and got to his feet. “And after, we will find whoever thought it wise to steal our mate, and we will make him pay.”
Three
Annabel
The sky was as gray as the rest of the world when the nothingness of dreamless sleep released its grip on me.
I didn’t know when I’d fallen asleep. All I remembered from before I’d lost consciousness was crying and screaming at Grim, and his granite features as he took in my despair. Possibly he’d magicked me to sleep when he got tired of listening to me curse his miserable name into the ground.
I stared blankly into the colorless swirl high above. Even in Jotunheim and Asgard, the sky had seemed familiar, as though those realms still inhabited the same plane of existence as Earth, despite all that set them apart. Hel? Hel was very clearly another thing entirely. The gray sky above should have been filled with clouds, but instead it looked like swirls of mist scored through with lines of inky blackness. It turned into an enormous funnel cloud of some sort, its touchdown disappearing far out of my field of vision.
Every muscle in my body hurt, and my eyes were swollen and sore from crying. Behind my ribs there was nothing but pain and visceral anguish. I couldn’t sense so much as a ghost of my mates’ awareness, and I didn’t dare prod at where the connections should have been out of fear that the resulting agony would rend my mind.
So this was death.
So far, I wasn’t a fan.
A deep, continuous rattle finally made its way through my misery to my conscience. It took me several minutes of staring into the swirling celestial sphere to care enough to investigate.
I turned my head to the right and was greeted by the disturbing sight of Mimir’s severed head still propped on the tree stump. His eyes were closed, his mouth hanging slightly open. The grinding sound was coming from him.
Snoring. The animated head was snoring.
They did say sleep apnea occurred somewhere between the sinuses and the throat, unluckily for Mimir.
The thought made me snort. I grimaced at the raw feeling crawling through my throat in response. Water would have been nice. And a pee.
To my surprise, I had full use of my limbs again. Grim must have unbound me after he’d knocked me out.
Small favors, I guess. I sat up, groaning at the stiffness in my body after a night on the bare ground, and took in my surroundings.
My eyebrows hit my hairline when I spotted the darkhaired Lokisson seemingly fast asleep on his side at the edge of the small clearing.
He’d… stayed? But why? My mates would have no way of knowing he was behind my disappearance. Why not just drop me off and then return, pretending like he knew nothing of my whereabouts while Ragnarök tore our worlds apart?
I was half-tempted to kick him awake and ask him. Or just kick him. But as I clumsily got to my feet and stretched my sore body, I decided against it. I didn’t particularly want to spend another sixteen to twenty-four hours bound on the ground and forced to wet myself, so I resorted to giving him a death glare before I left